black light | Revealing the hidden history of photography and cinema

A radical assessment of the racist motivations behind the concept of photography and cinema Traditional historical narratives have long linked the origins of photography and cinema to the goal of reproducing the visual world. Black Light offers a radical alternative vision to this understanding. By examining the visual, cosmological, and racial thought surrounding the emergence of these media, Christoph Wall-Romana argues that these media developed out of a desire to depict the unseen. Starting with the invention of the telescope simultaneously with the industrialization of the transatlantic slave trade, Black Light shows how the arts of photography and cinema intertwined with two major concerns of the Enlightenment: depicting the mysteries of the universe, and grappling with black identity. Wal-Romana uses literary and technical sources to illustrate how racial and astronomical thought intertwined throughout the development of modern visual media. By tracing the motivations behind unconventional photography and dynamic modeling, he reveals the racist underpinnings of research on photosensitive compounds, such as silver nitrate, and the racial biases implemented in post-Copernican cosmology. Black Light traces the pivotal period from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, when Europeans were contemplating the concept of “many worlds” and natural philosophy was giving way to “mechanical objectivism.” Wal-Romana shows how engagement with the nature of light has always been entangled with racist discourses about black people, especially after the discovery of the invisible spectrum in 1801 and the “black light” paradox. By taking media archeology beyond its narrow scope, this book offers a pioneering historical framework for reimagining our dominant ways of seeing and understanding the world.